Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Big and Little

This vacation time is killing me (because 4th year of medical school IS the best year of your life), but I'm so accustomed to working (and I mean knitting) under a serious time pressure that I think I've forgotten how to prioritize when I have time to read and knit and spend time with family and run with the dog :

Meet Hannah, my parents' incredibly-high-maintenance Portugese Water Dog. My dad takes so many pictures of her, that she tried to get into every picture of my knitting I've taken.

There's a long long list of major projects I want to accomplish (I'm supposed to be revising my undergrad history thesis, getting in serious shape before I go back on Active Duty with the Navy, studying to try to maintain even a fraction of my medical knowledge, sending out my Christmas cards), and so . . . I started a blog.

Even in my knitting I'm having trouble differentiating between the big and little projects. I should be working on the Green Mountain Spinnery* Norwegian Roses cardigan (from this amazingly gorgeous and well-photographed book). The sweater was a birthday present for my mom last April. (Well, I was on my Surgery rotation last April, so I arrived at her birthday party with a bunch of pattern books and had her pick out a pattern then. My mom is smart. She saw right through my ruse, but she loves me anyway. Plus, who can wear a heavy wool colorwork sweater in April?)

This sweater is the big project I should be working on. My goal is to have it done for Christmas, and currently it looks like this: and this: It's a fun project (except for every purl row, that is - I knit colorwork with one color in each hand, and my continental purling must be seen to be believed. . . ) But somehow I feel as if every time I pick it up is a time commitment. I can't just knit a row or two (and while I generally like to knit both sleeves simultaneously, those 4 balls of yarn are something else!). Instead, so many of my stitches each day are on the random projects from the "why do I have this stash?" (see Kristin's hats as a great use of this kind of yarn).

*A trip to the Green Mountain Spinnery in Putney, VT is highly recommended. After finishing Surgery, I cajoled a friend into accompanying me on a lovely New England spring day (cold and rainy) and we drove up from Providence. The retail store is a small room attached right to the Spinnery, and they have the knitted samples from the book, as well as all their yarns. You can pop your head in to look at their machinery - refurbished from the 1920s-1940s. So classically New England. They also have remnants that still have the spinning oils on them, but they are cheap and beautiful and I know how to wash wool. And then I had a beef stew with fiddleheads, which was a first for me. A great day trip.